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This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. At this particular moment, I’m feeling a little bad about myself. This profession I’ve chosen — and really, this life that I lead — relies so heavily on attention and metrics […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Humans have always tried to glimpse the future. Our methods have improved — from the stars and tarot cards to tremendously complex election forecasts. People love predictions, making them and reading […]

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) underlings are powering his takeover of the government with a “hardcore” work ethic that sacrifices sleeping for around-the-clock grinding.  Musk boasted that they are working long hours, even over weekends because their “opponents” take that time off. They moved sofa beds into the Office of Personnel […]

President Donald Trump is no stranger to conspiracy: He rose to political prominence by touting the racist lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. His team isn’t either: Take Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s longtime baseless conviction that childhood vaccines cause autism or the billionaire Elon Musk’s promotion of the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy […]

Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired recently, and more may be in danger of being let go. Umair Irfan — a climate change, energy policy, and science correspondent for Vox — has been specifically focused on layoffs looming over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of late. His reporting presents a […]

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear its first employment discrimination case since President Donald Trump took power and began a fairly comprehensive assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in government and private employment.  The case, known as Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, reads like it was generated for the very […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Denise Poirier was facing a pivotal moment. After teaching in Maine public schools for more than three decades, she was preparing to leave her career for what would likely be a […]

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox […]

Silicon Valley breeds visionary ideas, and with them, communities of dreamers. But not all those ideas and communities are benevolent. It can be hard to separate harmful movements from aspirational ones, but it’s easy to exploit those who mistake one for the other.  Throughout tech culture, this exploitation frequently generates dogmatic thinking and rigid adherence […]

Government websites have undergone massive changes since President Donald Trump returned to office. Some of the changes are routine — like swapping out the current president and vice president for their predecessors on the White House’s official site. But other changes go much further. Several sites — like USAID.gov, ReproductiveRights.gov, and the Spanish-language version of […]

Who hasn’t heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss” a thousand times? Like all cliches, it sticks because it’s rooted in truth, but it’s worth asking why ignorance can be so satisfying. If you read the history of philosophy, you don’t find all that much interest in the delights of ignorance. Instead, you hear a lot […]

One of the big challenges of reporting on the new administration is that it’s hard to figure out who’s really calling the shots. Take AI. In his comments to world leaders at the AI Action Summit in Paris last week, Vice President JD Vance laid out one view of where the Trump administration should go […]

Welcome to The Logoff. Today I have an update on the fight over your tax data, where the Trump administration has backed off a plan to give a DOGE staffer access to ultra-sensitive tax information. Wait, what did the White House want? The White House wanted the IRS to allow a DOGE team member to […]

The weather forecasts you see on TV or the severe storm alerts you get from your apps are powered by a federal science agency that’s in line for some of the most drastic cuts proposed by the Trump administration so far.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employs about 12,000 staffers around the world, […]

Kim Kardashian’s career has been one big guessing game. Since founding the extremely successful shapewear company Skims in 2019, the reality-star-turned-lifestyle-influencer has embarked on a number of surprising if not totally puzzling ventures, from trying to become a lawyer to starring in a poorly rated season of American Horror Story to filming an eerie “Santa […]

Former Democratic presidential candidate and US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has had an unpredictable political career. But ending up as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence was still, to many, a surprising twist. Gabbard has never worked in the intelligence bureaucracy. But her skepticism of US foreign intervention, forged during National Guard deployments […]

President Donald Trump says he wants the US to have the cleanest air and water on the planet — a desire, unsurprisingly, shared by all Americans.    Those resources don’t just appear. They come from nature. Freshwater mussels, clams, and aquatic vegetation, for example, filter rivers and streams and provide clean places to swim and habitat for […]

The AI world is moving so fast that it’s easy to get lost amid the flurry of shiny new products. OpenAI announces one, then the Chinese startup DeepSeek releases one, then OpenAI immediately puts out another one. Each is important, but focus too much on any one of them and you’ll miss the really big […]

What if workers were fully alienated from their labor? This is the question posed by severance, the titular procedure at the heart of the Apple TV+ hit, in which employees of the fictional corporate Lumon, divorced from their non-work selves, toil at meaningless labor in a basement-level prison. If the central metaphor of season one was […]

Last week, a Texas judge ordered Dr. Margaret Carpenter — a New York abortion doctor  — to pay at least $100,000 in penalties for failing to appear in court. Carpenter has found herself at the center of two major abortion lawsuits: In December, she became the target of the first-ever civil suit against an out-of-state […]

H5N1, a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza known as bird flu, continues to wreak havoc on the nation’s egg farms. In just the last month, more than 21.2 million egg-laying hens — about 7 percent of the national flock — have fallen prey to the virus or been brutally killed by egg producers in […]

Uziel Gomez, 26, can relate to his Gen Z clients who are navigating adulthood and personal finance for the first time.  It’s no secret that young people have faced a range of financial challenges early in their lives and careers, including the Covid-19 pandemic, rapidly rising costs of living, and steep tuition, says Gomez, founder […]

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. I’m working on a longer piece, so I wanted to bring you something a little lighter for this week’s newsletter. I’ve been reading Arnold Lobel’s Owl at Home with my 2-year-old recently, and I find myself thinking about […]

As soon as I sat down to write this, I got a text that simply said, “Hi.” In another era, I may have been intrigued by the mysterious message from an unknown number. Maybe I would’ve been curious about who wanted to say hello, and texted back. But this is not my first time playing […]